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It had me fondly thinking back on the days of Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance.

With virtually no dungeon-crawlers available on consoles – especially crawlers that include local co-op -R.A.W.represented a new hope for hack-and-slash fans.

Unfortunately, Wizarbox has given us a dungeon-crawling, loot-grinding experience that, while quite fun at times, largely falls flat.

The game is certainly old-school. I mean that in both good ways and bad.

It’s a very straightforward game, for one thing, allowing you to dive right into the action and loot-grinding. It’s certainly best played in co-op mode, as the single-player (for reasons I will get to soon enough) can be frustratingly difficult even on the normal difficulty mode.

Where the game is old-school in less-than-savory terms is three-fold.

1. The Graphics

While the environments are nice enough, and blessedly varied across the game, both the character models and the enemy models look like something from the previous generation of consoles.

This might be due to the extremely high, fixed-perspective camera. It’s a great angle to view fights and manage mobs at, but without the ability to zoom in on your character, it’s honestly hard to say what they look like.

This puts a serious dent in any customization options available – though most armor is differentiated by stats and colors only (i.e. Red Leather Leggings, Sacred Orange Paulders, etc.)

Beyond this, the graphics we’ve seen so far in screen shots definitely look better and sharper than what we find on the console, leading me to the conclusion that the PC version (coming this October) will also look much better than the Xbox version.

2. The Story

Story was never a big part of video games in the past – by and large – and certainly not a huge factor in action-RPGs.

But the story in Realms of Ancient War is not only generic and heavy-handed, it’s actually so generic and heavy-handed that it at times can actually detract from the rest of the game.

The story is old-school only in its refusal to innovate outside of high-fantasy tropes.

Elves, dwarves, Tree-Ents – the entire panoply of fantasy tropes is on garish display here. Almost certainly the fact that all dialogue is typed out rather than voice-acted comes as a blessing.

3. Extra Lives

The very worst, most awful, and inexplicable thing about this game is its use of Soulstones. You have a limited number – like lives in Super Mario Bros. - and when you die you use one and it resurrects you at your last save-point.

But when you run out of these precious gems, you have to start the entire level over again.

By this I mean, you have to lose every piece of loot you’ve found or purchased, every experience point you’ve earned, and any level you’ve gained. Not only do you start the level over, you lose all your progression.

This is old-school, to be sure, and also a terrible, confounding decision on the part of Wizarbox. Yes, in games like Diablo you can choose to play in Hardcore mode which could, and probably will, result in real death for your character. But you can also play in modes that allow for resurrection penalties rather than the total loss of all loot.

You die a lot in Realms of Ancient War. It doesn’t take long before starting a level over and re-grinding all that loot and leveling feels not just like a grind, but like a grind from hell you’d rather not play again.

Without a patch to fix this horrible decision, the game is simply not worth playing (despite its good parts, which I will come to…eventually.) It’s a dealbreaker, and would almost certainly be a dealbreaker even if every other element had been top-notch.

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Oh man, I COULD NOT AGREE MORE! I wanted SO BADLY for this game to be the one that got me over until torchlight 2…BOY was I ever disappointed! The game only has one actual song they use for background music, the rest of the stages have a repeating 10sec sound-clip. Once you beat the game, the only place to gain XP is the last stage, which only has 20 enemies or so before the boss, making it RIDICULOUSLY IMPOSSIBLE to grind out more levels after completion. Best loot doesn’t drop, it has to be purchased @ vendors. After getting one item the game was broken ( a necklace with “life stealing” effect-all I did was spam AOE and nothing could hurt me before I healed myself-even on HEROIC setting). Potions go from WAY TOO EXPENSIVE to not necessary @ all in the blink of an eye ( no scaling). Also, loot doesn’t get better with difficulty level, played through whole game on heroic, got same items (3 gold from enemies and chests even at final levels WTF?!?!)….this game really feels like a cheap attempt to jump on niche-game money. Can NOT believe I paid $15..I’ve played better games for 80 MS points. Add on top of all of that NO ONLINE MP!! Or how about the fact that if you have a friend join in, they ALWAYS start vanilla, with no loot and having to respec skill tree ( it never saves 2nd player info). And the game was pushed back HOW many times?!?! For what exactly? We should have a remores period for these games, even if it’s only 24hrs… I PROMISE then we’d see a LOT less of the CRAP they keep dumping on us on LIVE. When a disc console game flops, the developer feels it. When arcade games flop, they take the money they made (almost 100% profit thanks to no MP servers, composers, artists, etc or even TESTERS to pay for) and laugh all the way to the bank! Someone needs to stand up for the gamers, and make sure this crap stops happening. If I were this disappointed with ANYTHING TANGIBLE I would take it back and say WTF? I don’t even buy games new anymore JUST so I can take them back if they SUCK! I’m 31, part of the “Nintendo Generation” and seeing what gaming has become MAKES ME SICK! For as many games as make me say “Wow, I can’t believe how far we’ve come!”, there are 100x as many that make me cringe and never touch again. If these companies treated us more like loyal customers they wanted to please, rather than like drug-addicted junkies they can now over-charge for cheap cut-10-times product and laugh because they know we’ll be back, we’d have beautiful games! Remember the PS1/PS2 days? Jeez, I’d rathe rplay 8-bit Super Mario Bros. 1 than this P.O.S. I should have known from the download being 856MB for the WHOLE GAME, that I was buying QUALITY LOL, I have music playlists bigger than that, no joke. /endrant

Thanks for the review, I hope they patch it or fix some of the changes you pointed out here because there are far too many other legitimate hack n slash ARPGs out there right now to settle for a mediocre one…

Graphics: The hardware on consoles is 6-10 years old depending on what system. You cannot expect a console games to compete with today’s graphics, the hardware just isn’t there… From what I saw from videos on steam the graphics looked very on track with what you would expect today.

Too old school: I am an old school gamer, I can’t stand how watered down and unchallenging games are today. When you have no consequences to failure, what is rewarding? I think this is a breath of fresh air. I commend them for having the balls to put the “challenge” back into games admist a sea of money driven game companies that cater to the cries of people who want easy mindless pretty pictures and cut scenes.

Perhaps having two difficutly options would work: Old school mode and Total Noob mode

If you do not like challenging games then stay away from Dark Souls / Demon Souls, which did very well by the way.

Wait…you’re seriously telling *me* to stay away from Dark Souls and Demon’s Souls? Quick, google my name and Dark Souls and see what happens.

Okay, now that you’re back, the problem with this game isn’t the challenge. The problem is that it’s a BS challenge. It’s a hack and slash that has a terrible consequence for death – and yes, I think death should cost something, too.

The graphics are old by console standards. I’m sorry, but with games like Trine 2 and Sleeping Dogs and the Witcher 2 port coming out and this six/seven year old hardware, the graphics in RAW are just inexcusable.

this game is amazing, nice command on xbox360 joypad, fast and accurate! amazing graphics. to play in coop mode, the next player must press the start button or the enter key. the two weak points that I thought were the lack of variety of equipment and the game is short, otherwise it is very good! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uD49A494BIc